Álvaro Enrigue will read from his new novel Now I Surrender, followed by an on-stage conversation with author and professor José F. Aranda, Jr. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Álvaro Enrigue “belongs to many literary traditions at once and shows a great mastery of them all,” according to the great Latin American writer Carlos Fuentes. A celebrated Mexican novelist and essayist whose inventive, genre-blurring fiction blends history, politics, and literary play, he has held prestigious fellowships at Princeton and the New York Public Library and currently teaches at Hofstra University in New York. His novels include Hypothermia, Sudden Death (winner of the Herralde, Barcelona, and Poniatowska Prizes), and You Dreamed of Empires. The Washington Post called You Dreamed of Empires “an alternate history of Mexican conquest, with a Tarantino-ready twist,” and The New York Times Book Review named it one of the 10 best books of the year. Recognized in 2007 among the Bogotá 39 as one of Latin America’s top young writers, he is renowned for narratives that fuse intellectual depth with formal risk.
Enrigue makes his first Inprint appearance with his new novel Now I Surrender, translated by Natasha Wimmer, a sweeping, multi-layered epic set in the contested borderlands of the 19th‑century U.S.–Mexico frontier. Intertwining the stories of a Mexican woman fleeing a raid, a federale on the trail of cattle rustlers, the pursuit of Apache leader Geronimo, and a contemporary family seeking the truth, the novel is part historical fiction, part meta-narrative on memory and storytelling. Booklist calls it a “thought-provoking meditation on defiance, defeat, and assimilation,” and the Los Angeles Times writes, “His work is a moving and complex love letter to Mexico, mesmerizing anyone who has ever been awestruck by the country… It’s a slice of bloody American history with a timely edge.” Considered Enrigue’s most ambitious work yet, Now I Surrender radically recasts the story of how the West was “won.”
José F. Aranda, Jr. is Professor of Chicanx Literatures at Rice University. He holds the Terrance Doody Chair in English and has a dual appointment in the Department of Modern and Classical Literature & Culture. Professor Aranda is the author of When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America, as well as The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848-1948.
